Blockchain and other technologies in the system of traditional state and legal institutions

Introduction: the technologies of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and smart contracts in the context of philosophical and legal issues require their understanding. There is a voluminous body of literature on this subject today. However, the main leitmotif of the vast majority of publications is a simple description and further understanding of the structure of these technologies, the order of their implementation, development, and operation. The theoretical and philosophical aspects of the study of these new phenomena are not sufficiently covered. As a rule, the works simplypostulate the legal nature of the technologies being studied. But at the same time, all national states have the problem of regulating these regulatory technologies themselves, which are autonomous information and telecommunications systems that do without an intermediary in the person of the state or other official authorities. The purpose of the paper is to clarify the issue of the nature of these technologies, their relationship, and mutual influence with the traditional regulatory institutes. Methods: formal-legal, systematicity, comparison, generalization, and analysis. As a result, the author emphasizes that these digital technologies, although they contain claims to a symbiotic reconciliation with the traditional institutes, are a completelynew, alternative regulatory system. The basis of this system is not the legal principle of “if-then-otherwise”, which emphasizes the possibility of free action, but the principle of the physical law of “if-then”, as in the scenario language of a program code, where every event and action is invariant. The paper substantiates the conclusion that these technologies will exist in parallel with the traditional state-legal institutes, competing for the regulation of a significant part of civil law relations, as an appendix to a paper contract in terms of automating the mode of performance, and as the main contract based on the program code.